Tuesday, 28 January 2014

The Secret Sauce Is Continual Coaching (Guest Blog)

So there I was reading an interesting article in the Harvard
Business Review (You May Not Need Big Data After All) discussing
the importance of data and how to use it effectively.

The main thrust, as you
may have guessed from the title, is that companies could spend huge amounts of
time, money and effort identifying and analysing the enormous sources of data
they now have access to, in order to generate benefit...but they would be
better off simply using the data they already have more effectively.

The article was landing really well with me – and made me
think of young Mark Ellis here – when it changed tack, making me want to leap
out of my chair and shout ‘HURRAH’.

Here’s the longer quote:

‘It might seem that a combination of well-defined
expectations, performance data, and clearly articulated business rules would be
sufficient to help people make evidence-based decisions on a daily basis. Not
so! The secret sauce is continual coaching
aimed at improving the performance of every individual.’

Having grown up with a penchant for finance I always found
it easiest to reach for the data. It took me a while to realise that there’s a
people part to the equation. (If I did not have a penchant for finance, that
might have read ‘there’s a people part to the answer’).

How often do we learn that the company executives or the
department heads have studied the data and identified the new metrics or the
new goals that will generate nirvana? The new goals are rolled out, hopefully
through some form of scorecard system to help everyone track the changes
(although often only at the very highest levels in the organisation and
probably with dull spreadsheets) and then the leadership turns its attention to
the next task. I know I was guilty of this.

Surprisingly the desired results don’t
happen.

It reminds me of the time in one company when thousands of
hours were spent calculating and recording evidence to prove the fantastic
improvements in productivity that had been targeted across the region. The
operational teams were ecstatic. The FD meanwhile pointed out that overall
profit had not changed!! Like squeezing on one side of a balloon whilst the
other side rises, somehow all the savings had been mysteriously spent somewhere
else. (Possibly on the time spent creating rules, applying definitions and
filling out spreadsheets adding it all up!).

If you need people to change their behaviours, if you want
the culture to change, you cannot simply state a new series of goals and
measures and expect it to work. If the manager of a football club told the team
they had a new target of winning all games 3-0, but made no other changes, why
would you expect success?

We seem to have a belief system in the corporate world that
if we hire good people they can work the rest out for themselves. Going further
with the football analogy, it would be like Man Utd buying the top 11 players
in the world and sending them out to play without any discussion (coaching) on
what to do together and how to do it. (Okay, I can hear someone saying that’s
what appears to have happened in the recent game against Sunderland, but you
know what I mean!)

The secret sauce is
coaching.

I am a coach working with all levels of management, so
naturally I love these words. However, the words can be used more broadly in
the sense of ‘support’. We need to provide employees with the time and space to
understand what the new metrics mean to them, how it impacts on their daily
activities and what changes make most sense for them within the wider corporate
vision. We need a continual feedback loop. Coaching enables the people to
identify the best way forward to achieve the new goal whilst still achieving
what’s right for the organisation overall - Avoiding the effect of squeezing that
balloon.

So, the next time you are seeking to create changes across
your organisation or the next time you receive a new set of metrics and goals
‘from above’, demand that you and your colleagues are given the time and
support to identify and understand what’s happening. Try coaching...the secret sauce!

___________________________

Phil Renshaw is a highly skilled executive coach with a lifetime of experience in international banking and finance - you can find out more about Circulus (and Phil) by clicking here.